Storytelling Large Enough to Transport Us

Robert Mitchum ©Terry O'Neill

Heroes and heroines capture our imaginations and can inspire us to pursue dreams we had not considered before. Literature, mythology, biography, folklore are among the places we come to drink from fountains of youth, courage, love, meaning to carry us through our days and years. To have visions and dream dreams.

There is no way to demonstrate possibilities with concrete visual illustration more than film. Larger than life ideas. Larger than life personalities. Larger than life events. These are carried to our consciousness through the larger than life storytelling of filmmakers in a medium that expresses in a fashion that makes for the most intimate personal impact.

Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Rosemary's Baby ©Shahrokh Hatami

Those same storytellers, interpreters of dreams and explorers of ideas, actually share the same personal hopes, needs and aspirations as any of us. They have the same desires to be greater than they think they are by “speaking” with their full persons on screen. Movie theaters, super-screens and TV screens are where our storytellers now gather us together, just as our ancestors were gathered by storytellers around campfires, to hear legends of heroes and great deeds.

We all personally resonate with our favorite interpreters and they become in some way our personified evidence that we are, or can become heroes, too. The imagery we exhibit in our downtown San Francisco gallery as well as on our website is a broad collection of the iconography of film that speaks both grandly and intimately to us. The force of artistic presence that a photo of a great actor or actress, either in character or not, pushes us and pulls us through our imaginations involuntarily toward some personal mission we may not even recognize.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ©Lawrence Schiller

As a touchstone, images with this kind of resonance become as much a personal reflection upon individual possibilities as they stimulate us to wonder, test fear, aspire to courage, explore feelings of love, and ride our imaginations to new places. We need our symbols, perhaps slightly out of reach, and filmmaking makes those symbols nearly tangible enough to touch.